Automatic Formant Tracking by a Newton-Raphson Technique

A wide range of speech investigation requires natural-sounding synthetic speech whose individual acoustic features—such as pitch, formants, and duration—can be varied independently. This study describes an algorithm for obtaining such synthetic speech by automatically analyzing natural speech to obtain data for the control of a formant synthesizer. The lowest three formants of natural speech were determined by finding simultaneous solutions of the least-square-fit equations by means of a Newton-Raphson technique. The data obtained from this formant analysis, together with pitch data which were also obtained automatically, were used for controlling a computer-simulated formant synthesizer. This algorithm was tested for various sentences and speakers, and the synthesized speech was found to be of good quality.